A New Yorker for Brooklynites

This week, the magazine features a Sketchbook on a rare Art Deco magazine from the late twenties known as The Brooklynite. Some thirty issues of this monthly magazine were discovered by the archivists at the Brooklyn Historical Society a few years ago, while they were doing inventory after a full-scale renovation that had been completed in 2003. Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting the Society’s Othmer Library and looking through issues of the magazine spanning 1926 to 1930. For anyone who is a fan of The New Yorker, sifting through the pages of The Brooklynite is a bit like seeing a reflection in a fun-house mirror. Edited by Herbert G. Edwards, the magazine is an homage of sorts, featuring departments similar to the Talk of the Town, Profiles, and various critics sections, as well as cartoon sketches and small ads. Its style was satirical, breezy, and sharp. And this was reflected in the publication’s first Editorial Note, which ran in its sixth issue. A periodical is needed, it argued, that will discuss Brooklyn and related subjects in a civilized manner, and will laugh at Brooklyn when necessary. The Brooklynite “will never seek to edify. If it accomplishes that sometimes, well—who cares.”

The Brooklynite is not the only magazine to pattern itself after The New Yorker. Another short-lived jazz age magazine, The Chicagoan, sought to emulate the magazine’s formula in its pages, with colorful covers and imitative commentaries. (The Brooklynite was not even the first journal of that name to make waves in Manhattan literary circles. In 1910, the writer Hazel Pratt Adams started a journal by that name which published original poetry by H. P. Lovecraft and others.) But The Brooklynite offered an ingenious suburban twist on The New Yorker’s successful mix of satire and serious journalism. Humorous pieces on borough etiquette and the Junior League sit alongside lengthy features on politicians and media tycoons. An amusing essay titled “Petting for Beginners” points to the Botanic Gardens and Sheepshead Bay as perfect spots for “light, and private, recreation,” while an investigative piece on the Brooklyn Y.M.C.A. reveals the unspoken anti-Semitism behind its admissions policies. Pieces on the “ancient sport” of Ping-Pong and “better built chorus girls” alternate with observations on high-society weddings and engagements written by the magazine’s society editor, M. D.’Lerious.

This winning formula extends to the sly twist on The New Yorker’s rubrics—the article “categories” that the magazine uses, such as “Annals of Communication” or “The Sporting Scene.” Instead of the Talk of the Town, The Brooklynite offers The Stroller; instead of Profiles, we have Full Face; rather than A Reporter at Large, there is From a Reporter’s Note Book; and so on. The magazine itself even acknowledged the resemblance in an Editorial Note which ran in the October, 1926 issue. A new publication, it read, must necessarily overcome the stigma of imitation placed upon it when “classified with that one or more magazines to which it may bear a comparison—however slight—in the eyes of the public. The Brooklynite has been so classed. We admit it.” In doing so, the magazine freed itself to be as distinctively Brooklyn-esque as it wanted to be. But a similarity in style, rubrics, and tone is not all the two magazines shared. They also shared a few contributors. At least five writers—Joseph Fulling Fishman, Emile C. Schnurmacher, Stanley Jones, Creighton Peet, and Louis Kronenberger—contributed to both The New Yorker and The Brooklynite during the same period in the late twenties. While many of these writers contributed lengthy features to The Brooklynite, most of their contributions to The New Yorker consisted of shorter pieces, such as Talk stories and fiction.

The Brooklynite covered Brooklyn society and swanky cultural events, but it wasn’t above taking a swipe at its more sophisticated neighbor now and then. In a Stroller story bemoaning the ordeal of travelling from Brooklyn into the city in the magazine’s October, 1926, issue, someone wrote,

Necessity the other day drove us into the confines of Lower Manhattan. The place invariably makes us blue so lacking is it in the healthy life and bustle of our own teeming thoroughfares. We dropped in at Trinity Church cemetery to get cheered up if possible and sat down on a tombstone.

Aside from a few occasional jabs, however, The Brooklynite was admirably restrained in its criticism of Manhattan. It preferred to focus instead on the concerns of its home borough—a “bourgeois borough,” as one Brooklynite writer put it, “of baby carriages, rubber plants, gold fish and green grocers.” Clearly, the Brooklynite era isn’t as far from our own as one might have thought.

Erin Overbey, the archive editor of newyorker.com, has been an archivist at the magazine since 1995.

Recommended Stories

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.